Thirteen Lives director Ron Howard opens up on re-creating Thai cave miracle on Gold Coast
Custom-built cave interiors, water tanks, teams of extras and Yatala warehouses – Ron Howard reveals the mammoth task of re-creating the Thai cave rescue on the Gold Coast for his new movie Thirteen Lives.
QLD News
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Ron Howard, who has directed a new movie about the incredible 2018 Thai soccer team rescue, has revealed the elaborate ways cast and crew perfectly recreated the Thai cave system during filming on the Gold Coast.
The Academy Award-winning director and his Thirteen Lives production team recruited hundreds of local extras and used 3D studies to design sections of the caves before flooding them in custom-built water tanks, all out of warehouses in Yatala.
The film, which premieres globally on Amazon Prime Video on August 5, stars Hollywood actors Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell as Rick Stanton and John Volanthen – the pair of British cave divers who found the trapped soccer team – and Joel Edgerton as Australian anaesthetist Dr Richard Harris.
The trio were pivotal in the successful rescue of the 12 boys and their coach, who were stranded in the flooded Chiang Rai cave system for 17 days before being anesthetised and ferried 4km in a rescue effort that captured the world’s attention.
Howard, who drew on his experience recreating true events, including for Oscar-winning film Apollo 13 (1995), arrived on the Gold Coast in February 2021, with cast and crew completing a two-week hotel quarantine and remaining within the state until filming wrapped in June.
With Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis movie still being shot at Village Roadshow Studios, they sourced two warehouses in Yatala for the production offices and constructed a large, custom-built water tank and cave interiors.
“We were trying to re-create perfectly as much as we possibly could,” Howard told The Sunday Mail from London.
“There was lots of footage of the outside of the cave so we could create that very authentically, but Molly Hughes, the production designer, had another problem: no one had really been able to photograph what those caves looked like when they were flooded.”
Because of the global rights in place for various projects about the rescue, Howard couldn’t consult with everyone involved, including Dr Harris.
Key British rescue divers Stanton and Jason Mallinson were on set training actors and stunt performers and advising set designers, taking them through studies of the caves, many of them in 3D, and pinpointing the sections that proved pivotal to the rescue.
The design team, led by Hughes, who was an art director on the Harry Potter franchise, then constructed six key sections of the cave for filming.
“We would then drop (them) down into tanks so we could flood it, immerse them and re-create these very exciting moments,” Howard said.
“We all wanted to get it right, to honour this story. Contemporary audiences demand that commitment to authenticity.
“They expect it. It’s part of the entertainment value … to feel like the director, the filmmakers are taking you to a place and that it resonates, it rings true.
“So that was our mantra, every hour of every day.”
To re-create the mammoth scale of the rescue effort with the challenges of border closures, Howard put out an open casting call in South East Queensland for paid extra roles, asking predominantly for local Thai man and women, and sorted them into teams.
“We did a lot of local casting. We also imported a lot of people,” he said.
“They had actually trained for certain activities and our assistant directors had all of these scenarios worked out so when the actors showed up and the cameras were there.
“They were literally walking into an environment that very much already matched in terms of behaviour and look – everything that you could see in any of the news footage.
“So that was an important achievement and I think it made a world of difference for the actors.”
The production filmed across Mudgeeraba, Numinbah Valley, and Carrara – which stood in for the city and surrounds of the Chiang Rai Province – as well as a hospital scene at Griffith University in Logan, and Brisbane Domestic Airport was used as Chiang Rai Airport.
While looking for a suitable location to host filming, Howard, who co-founded Imagine Entertainment with Brian Grazer, approached the Queensland screen industry in 2020 in an encouraging sign for the state’s global reputation.
The film injected about $52m into the state economy and created more than 250 jobs for Queensland crew and extras.
“We were looking for some place that could work topographically for us and be a production-friendly area, and Queensland fit the bill on both counts,” Howard said.
“In the last 10 to 15 years, Australia has become one of those go-to places – great crew members, the government is co-operative, there are good tax credits and so forth – but more than anything, you could just get a lot of good work done.
“There’s talent in front of and behind the camera, there’s great Aussie work ethic that is something everybody knows about and appreciates.
“We had all this footage to look at and say, ‘can we create that here?’, and the answer was yes, so it was a really terrific outcome for us and a great way to make the movie.”
Howard gave Queensland a “five-star rating on all levels”, saying the state’s screen industry was “everything I would have expected and more” and the resulting film was a testament to their work.
After initial discussions in 2020, the production was offered a $13m cash injection from the federal government, with added support from the Palaszczuk government via Screen Queensland’s Production Attraction Strategy, to seal the deal.
At the time in late 2020, Screen Queensland was fielding an influx of inquiries from global productions looking for a filming safe haven during the pandemic, with Elvis and Netflix’s Spiderhead both already under way on the Gold Coast.
“I have to say, the Government supports the arts, the government supports production, and so Screen Queensland and others, it made a world of difference; their engagement, and that certainly always factors into these decisions and it did in this one,” Howard said.
“I have always enjoyed the collaboration with Aussies in front of and behind the camera over the years and here you had a crew that was primarily made up of those folks and all that passion, all that commitment, that work ethic, that spirit, that ability to get things done was there every day.
“(My wife) Cheryl and I really enjoyed our time off, there wasn’t a lot of it, but when we did, the hikes, the beach, the food the people, all fantastic – we’d like to have a bit more of that.”
Thirteen Lives premieres on Amazon Prime Video on August 5.
FILMING LOCATIONS:
Chiang Rai province city and surrounds: Mudgeeraba, Yatala, Numinbah Valley, Carrara.
Hospital: Griffith University Logan Campus
Chiang Rai airport: Brisbane Domestic Airport
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